The present invention relates to feeder/delinkers for weapons, and, more particularly, to feeder/delinkers used in conjunction with gatling guns.
The gatling gun, a forerunner of the contemporary machine gun, was introduced by Richard J. Gatling in 1862. This weapon incorporates a ring of barrels that fire sequentially as the ring of barrels is rotated. In early versions, the barrels were rotated by means of a hand crank; more recent versions incorporate a drive motor. The U.S. Army used the gatling gun in the battle of Santiago, Chile in 1898. Other nations used it in colonial wars in Africa and Asia until the beginning decades of the 20th Century; it was also used by the United States in the Vietnam conflict.
To feed a gatling gun, a feeder/delinker mechanism takes belted ammunition, strips (delinks) the individual cartridges from the belts and then feeds the delinked ammunition to the gatling gun. While the gatling gun is still in service, the gun was last manufactured by the firearms division of the General Electric Company about twenty years ago. Thus, there is a continuing need for spare and replacement components and improved feeders.
The demand for replacement parts is concentrated on the feeder/delinker unit which has become a weak point in the overall system. One persistent problem has been the tendency of the feeder/delinker unit to jam due to misalignment of the cartridges as they are fed into the delinker. Another problem relates to breakage and consequent jamming due to the fragility of the various sprockets incorporated into the feeder/delinker. Yet another deficiency in the prior art design is the difficulty and time required for clearing the jammed conditions once they occur, this being due to the lack of access to the interior of the feeder/delinker. Because of this lack of access, the jamming can only be cleared by first removing the feeder/delinker from the gun and disassembling the unitxe2x80x94a time consuming procedure.
Another problem is the requirement to rotate the barrels in order to load linked ammunition into the feeder. Rotating the barrels can cause the gun to fire unintentionally. Rotating the barrels is also awkward when the barrels are hot. Lastly, rotating the barrels requires the helicopter gunner to lean out into a one hundred mile per hour slipstream.
Still another problem with the current design feeder/delinker is that in case of a severe jam it is necessary to force the rotation of the internal sprockets by using a straight bladed screw driver as a lever on the gear teeth. The new design provides two radius edged surfaces to prevent damage to the cast housing and to allow easier access to the gear teeth.
The prior art feeder/delinker was also functionally deficient in terms of its operation with sabot light armor piercing (SLAP) ammunition. With this type of ammunition, the prior art mechanism did not reliably chamber the cartridge as they were xe2x80x9chandedxe2x80x9d off from the feeder/delinker into the gun. During this part of the operation, control of the fore and aft positions of the cartridge was not adequate to assure trouble-free operation.
The prior art feeder/delinker is also deficient in that an ammunition jam could bend the pin that secured the drive gear to the main driven component thereby setting the entire unit out of time and rendering is inoperable.
The present invention addresses the problems of the prior art feeder/delinker and offers improvements essential to their correction.
In accordance with the invention claimed a number of improvements are made in the feeeder/delinker unit over the version most recently produced by the General Electric Company.
It is, therefore, one object of this invention to provide a means for improving the degree of alignment achieved within the feeder/delinker.
Another object of this invention is to modify the design of the internal components of the feeder/delinker as needed to substantially eliminate the breakage due to fragile parts.
A further object of this invention is to modify the design of the end plate as needed to assure reliable, trouble-free operation of the feeder/delinker with SLAP ammunition.
A still further object of this invention is provide convenient access to the interior of the feeder/delinker via a hatch so that any jammed condition may be corrected without removing the feeder/delinker from the gatling gun.
Another object of this invention is to provide a means to hold the ammunition in the proper location while closing the loading cover. This is accomplished by use of a split hatch design.
A still further object of this invention is to make alignment of the linked ammunition more consistent as it is pulled into the feeder/delinker. This is accomplished through the addition of a second sprocket to the rear of the links.
Yet another object of this invention is to provide a means for attaching various link exhaust chutes.
Further objects and advantages of the invention will become apparent as the following description proceeds and the features of novelty which characterize the invention will be pointed out with particularity in the claims annexed to and forming part of the specification.